From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930

For many immigrants, the move from Sicily to a New York tenement was accompanied by rapid, significant, and often surprisingly satisfactory changes in a wide variety of social relationships. Many of these changes can be traced to the influence of a changing housing environment._x000D_

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From Sicily to Elizabeth Street analyzes the relationship of environment to social behavior. It revises our understanding of the Italian-American family and challenges existing notions of the Italian immigrant experience by comparing everyday family and social life in the agrotowns of Sicily to life in a tenement neighborhood on New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century._x000D_

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Moving historical understanding beyond such labels as "uprooted" and "huddled masses," the book depicts the immigrant experience from the perspective of the immigrants themselves. It begins with a uniquely detailed description of the Sicilian backgrounds and moves on to recreate Elizabeth Street in lower Manhattan, a neighborho